Fleet Safety: Putting a Stop to Rolling Stops

Everyone’s done it -- that unconscious little pause when you come to a stop sign. With a quick look around, you roll on through, hoping there are no police waiting to catch you in the act. We all know rolling stops are illegal, but how much harm can you really do at such a slow speed?

Rolling stops can do a lot of harm. Keep in mind, even at low speeds, a pedestrian is no match against a vehicle of any size.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration, one-quarter of traffic fatalities and roughly half of all traffic injuries are attributed to intersections. “Whenever you have an interruption in the flow of traffic, such as at intersections, you’re more likely to have accidents,” said Del Lisk, vice president of safety services for Lytx®.

Rolling stops are all too tempting for commercial drivers in urban and residential areas. The pressure to make on-time deliveries may cause drivers to take unnecessary risks. Even though stopping is the safe thing to do, it’s easier to keep the wheels turning.

Video-based safety solutions give carriers a powerful and effective way to help identify unsafe driving behaviors and correct them through coaching. Successful coaching helps reduce collisions by preventing them from happening in the first place. However, unsafe behaviors can only be coached if they’re identified and, until now, rolling stops were difficult to detect, which also meant they were hard to prevent.

“Conventional in-cab video was designed to trigger G-force-related events such as swerving, hard braking or an impact,” said Lisk. Video capture of a rolling stop would only occur as a byproduct of another, more abrupt event, such as sudden braking or a sharp turn as the driver accelerated out of the rolling stop.

The new DriveCam® rolling stop trigger, an enhancement to the Lytx DriveCam™ exception-based video safety program, now gives carriers the ability to capture the more subtle movements of a rolling stop.

The DriveCam rolling stop trigger uses existing maps onboard the event recorder to pinpoint stop signs. If a driver comes within eight yards of a stop sign, machine-vision technology scans the sign and correlates the data with the driver’s speed. If the vehicle fails to come to a complete stop, video of the event is captured and can be used for coaching.

By triggering on rolling stops, DriveCam is now able to more consistently identify this behavior so clients can correct it and reduce the chances their drivers will be involved in intersection accidents.

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